Magnificent Errors
Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.

In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.

The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

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Magnificent Errors
Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.

In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.

The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.

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Magnificent Errors

Magnificent Errors

by Sheryl Luna
Magnificent Errors

Magnificent Errors

by Sheryl Luna

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Overview

Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.

In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.

The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780268201821
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date: 02/01/2022
Series: Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry
Pages: 88
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.18(d)

About the Author

Sheryl Luna’s first collection, Pity the Drowned Horses, won the inaugural Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, Anderson Center, Ragdale Foundation, and Canto Mundo. She received the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award from Sandra Cisneros in 2008. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, and Notre Dame Review, among others.

Read an Excerpt

Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps

Words fall out of my coat pocket,
soak in bleach water. I touch everyone’s dirty dollars. Maslow’s got everything on me.
Fourteen hours on my feet. No breaks.
No smokes or lunch. Blank-eyed movements:
trash bags, coffee burner, fingers numb.
I am hourly protestations and false smiles.
The clock clicks its slow slowing.
Faces blur in a stream of hurried soccer games,
sunlight and church certainty. I have no poem to carry, no material illusions.
Cola spilled on hands, so sticky fingered,
I’m far from poems. I’d write of politicians,
refineries and a border’s barbed wire,
but I am unlearning America’s languages with a mop. In a summer-hot red polyester top, I sell lotto tickets. Cars wait for gas billowing black. Killing time has new meaning.
A jackhammer breaks apart a life. The slow globe spirals, and at night black space has me dizzy.
Visionaries off their meds and wacked out
Meth heads sing to me. A panicky fear of robbery and humiliation drips with my sweat.
Words some say are weeping twilight and sunrise.
I am drawn to dramas, the couple arguing, the man head-butting his wife in the parking lot.
911: no metered aubade, and nobody but myself to blame.

Table of Contents

I

1. Lowering Your Standards for Food Stamps

2. The Vocation

3. The Thief

4. Change

5. Tornillo’s Tent Prison for Migrant Children

6. Salt Shaker

7. Meditation on Hunger

8. Breathing the Border’s Fire

9. The Poet

10. Autumn’s Art

11. Forehead

12. Regeneration

13. What I’d Say if I had Fifteen Minutes of Fame

II

14. Shock and Awe

15. Neighbors Smoke on an Apartment Porch Owned by a

Mental Health Agency

16. Secret Missionary for the Virgin Mary Off His Meds

17. The Sailing Bicycle

18. Shock Treatment

19. Lit

20. Lamentation to Praise

21. The Language of Drowning

22. The Star Song

23. To Rest

24. The Leaves

25. Manic with Depression

26. Eccentric

27. A Homeless Poet Friend Rages at the World’s Lesser People

28. The Party

29. Adopting Step-Father

30. Alone

31. Voice

32. Figures

33. Anxiety and Diagnosis

34. The Artist Addressing Violence

35. The Singer

36. She Wishes She Never Had

37. I.Q. Over 160?

38. The Prayer

III

39. Night

40. Rubbernecking

41. Listening to Sky

42. Risk

43. The Laugh

44. We Believe in Kindness Because It’s Hard to Die

45. Casualties

46. The Witness

47. The Hummingbird

48. Clouds and Sapling

49. Prayer for this Clay Earth

50. Mud

51. Finding Water

52. The Transgression

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